Random Thoughts on a Viable XR Citizens’ Assembly

DOLLAR SIGN (c)2019 by MR. FISH

Random selection won't do, at lest not initially. In all honesty, through no real fault of their own, the citizenry at large is too ill-informed and contentious on the reality of the Anthropocene Extinction (AX) to deal with the XR Citizen's’ Assembly (XR-CA) ) roles and responsibilities rationally and univocally in confronting and engaging the oligarchy and corporatocracy of the fascist capitalism that must be overcome if humanity is to survive. Sad, but true. If we survive, those delusions and divisions may be overcome over time, but not in time to deal with the ongoing AX event.

As Roger Hallam suggests, however, some form of sortition is most promising. But the initial selections cannot be random. The scientific community within the XR, combined with prominent XR advocates and speakers like Hallam himself, ought to be the first 'pool' of Assembly candidates from which to draw the dozen members of the Assembly. But that alone won't do -- there must be some way to engage vox populi directly, in real-time, with a dozen drawn by lot from those key XR communities.(1)

Perhaps the best way to do this, while protecting the identities and privacy of individual citizens, is to set up a channel/group in the deep web, where those conditions are currently state-of-the-(clandestine)-art. The dark web may even be needed as well, if civil disobedience -- as deliberate breaking of the law -- is to be discussed, acted upon, and carried out. Nonviolent dissident action need not go above the deep web to the surface web or below to the dark web. The surface web should be almost entirely set aside for CA purposes. It's a global circus and carnival, teeming with noise lacking meaningful signal 99.99 ...% of the time. At most, a live-streamed channel of all gatherings and meetings of the Citizen's Assembly with the representatives of the actual members of the ultra-elite oligarchy should be broadcast on a surface web youtube or other free public channel (administered by deep and dark web XR staff).

As a 21st century XR coordinator and career technocrat, this strikes me as a plausible way to put up a Citizen's Assembly in three layers of communication that might actually work: from vox populi deep and dark through an assembly of a dozen XR spokespersons to the power and wealth regime who got us into this global suicide pact and have kept us sleepwalking into catastrophe for at least 30 years.

Local XR chapters could assist the citizenry in adapting to the deep and dark web apps in a TOR browser. This is about as close to live-streaming democracy as we may hope to get on current public tech. Two tactical issues: (1) who are the root and other system techs running the deep and dark internet of things for the citizenry? And, (2) how are fascist capitalists to be involved? For (2), each should have a voice boiling down to a vote just like very other citizen. But no more, no less. For (1), I confess I'm not sure how that could be secured from any and all human corruption and malware injections. My technosterone levels were never that high as a technocrat, and it has been draining away lately. but If there are any TOR and deep and dark web gurus in the XR community, I would look to them for guidance in implementing this three-layered sortition model sooner than later.(2)

In closing, finally, this must also be said. While presumably entirely fictitious, consider the sort of rebellion seen in such tech-fantasy as the Mr. Robot miniseries. The idea of having a black-ops elite cadre of super-hackers turning the world of fascist capitalism inside-out and upside-down is intriguing. Should events and actions of such kind be in the XR’s battle plan and technology arsenal? It goes beyond ‘mere’ civil disobedience, yes, and cases such as Julian Assange’s and Edward Snowden’s are public examples of deterrents, showing just how severe the consequences of such actions are.

What does ‘civil disobedience’ even mean, legally speaking (e.g., under the PATRIOT ACT), when laws are broken without compunction or consequence or they are simply superseded or suspended by fascist capitalist exigency? If dark web XR activism could nonviolently bring the World Bank, SWIFT, the IBS, the IMF, the Federal Reserve, etc. to their knees just one day a month for only a few seconds, the vile maxim and vicious cycle of power and wealth would be broken. It would be up to the Citizen’s Assembly to determine just how long and how severe those take-downs would need to be to seize full control of that power and wealth. Or until the instant extinction event of global WMD warfare is triggered to neutralize that power grab with extreme prejudice.

** CAVEAT: I'm brainstorming here. It's an out-of-the-box idea on how to envision Citizens' Assembly both operationally real and true to the XR declarations and demands at the same time, by leveraging resources that we have on hand already. I suspect the human problem is the more difficult ... my limited experience with the deep web, and I have none on the dark side (yet), seems to imply this may be a fairly straightforward model to implement on current tech. **

Notes

(1) A dozen is the right number. Like a jury, unanimity would be required. Like a hung jury, anything less than a unanimous verdict would rely on vox populi interaction to drive toward a unanimous verdict.

(2) Tactical question #(2) begs the question of what manner of containment should be imposed on the most egregious ecocidal capitalist and war criminals. I have some thoughts on this, but I would have to be talked down from my sadistic inclinations to share them. Despite being a Christian, mercy and grace for those vile sinners do not come easily to heart, soul, or mind for me. Dwayne Booth’s cartoon above, DOLLAR SIGN, seems to illustrate a fitting penance.

21st Century Addiction to the Fix Being In

Disagreement is not an option (illustrations by Mr Fish, used by permission).

The rigging of black and open markets in the addiction industry has never been as entrenched or as flawed at the same time as at present. It feeds on annihilation and alienation oblivious to the reality it stalks, kills, and rapaciously consumes. Being human and humane as homo sapiens somehow moved beyond our very ken as such, at least in moral and rational community.[i]

A minuscule and anonymous elite cabal rules the world through a 1% rapacious oligarchy and praetorian corporatocracy. The other 99% of us are the raw human resources externalized and exploited to death by that cabal and its minions. The top 9% of tht 99% form a fatuous aristocratic buffer between cabalistic corporatocracy and the vast underclass majority beneath them. Underclass suppression, repression, control, and rule are on the verge of more extinction-level-event facts in reality than they and their rulers know (or will openly confess, with apology). Both Kuhnian scientific and cultural revolutions are horrifically AWOL from the front of engagement.[ii]

Nonviolent rebellion is the only remaining freedom at hand. The horizon of the black hole of capitalist fatuity and futility has been crossed. It was a Rubicon into Anthropocene extinction (AX) and we are sleepwalking into catastrophe, already gone all-in for a global suicide pact. We must not fight tyranny expecting to win, we must fight tyranny because it is tyranny; because tyrants and dilettante aristocracy both must acknowledge that true nobility lies in the genetic and memetic reality of nonviolent rebellion.

Retribution is another matter. Justly carried out, isolation in exile seems an ethically right and morally good penalty for tyranny. Done properly, in relatively comfortable solitude, but without human contact unless initiated by those other than the tyrant, and under severe restriction and with full spectrum monitoring. Hope dies; action begins.

Stoic nonviolent courage is now the lifeblood of the only moral road to peaceful rebellion, and it flows in undercurrents of the good drawing the good. By apocalyptic ecocidal annihilation or by Christian Apocalyptic tribulation, or both, an End is coming. Still, we willfully deny or ignore its signs even as its reality is increasingly irrefutable and irreversible, as imminent as a minute, as irrefutable as it is inconceivable.

Our false hope, blithe indifference, blind fear, raging anger, ephemeral love, and nihilistic hate are semiotically engineered as the realism we believe to be reality that’s true. What cowering fools we are to be bought in, sold out, held captive and enslaved to serve such infixed tyranny!

NOTES

[i] On statistical evidence, relevance, and rationality, I no longer speak for dogmatic advocates of the Bayesian Way. Instead, I stand on the probabilistic causal scientific realism from (Fetzer 1981) and Peircean pragmaticism more generally (especially phaneroscopy and cenoscopy).

[ii] Trust between aristocrats and their cabalistic patrons is a non-issue: patronage is simply an effete sign of brutal efficacy in bringing about opaque enslavement to tyrannous powers. Between aristocrats and the underclass they transcend, idolatry is currency and deceit the coin of the realm. Traitors to capitalist tyranny are subject to instant termination by rulers, used for show-and-tell control or disappeared with extreme prejudice by extraordinary rendition. 21st-century aristocracy is likely to be the worst possible status in the face of rebellion: stalked and hunted prey on one hand and deeply entrenched hatred at the other. A human and humane aristocracy must choose sides, betray neither, yet be an arbiter of what is and is not trustworthy. Aristocratic dereliction of class and human dignity chooses tyranny and seals its own doom. Aristocratic character is the choice to side with the oppressed – not just in case, but all-in whatever the case.

Elitist Tyranny and The Mass Insanity of Modern Humanity

Excerpt from my DMin dissertation, The End Signs! Are We Getting the Message? (Portland Seminary, Semiotics and Future Studies program, Lead Mentor Leonard Sweet, February 2019)

LIFE ON EARTH is facing mass extinction – and this time it is humans rather than asteroids threatening near total wipe out of the planet’s creatures.

We have already entered the sixth mass extinction in history. This time, we are the architects of our own demise. If humankind survives at all, 50-90% of us are doomed, nonetheless, sooner than later. Here is who the other 10% are. Some of them—the scientismic aristocracy—will be exempt (note #1). The survival chances for the rest of us are around 1.5-2% (see note 1 below):

The Wealth, Power, Force, and Control Nexus of Inverted Totalitarianism

The tiny ruling elite cabal already have an exit strategy and survival plan. My guesstimate is that it may have been conceived and set in motion in the 1970s. More likely, perhaps, it became a matter of ‘oligarchy emergency’ only recently, sometime around the mid-1990s. In that case, the elite cabal of rulers had (by choice or by sloth or apathy) ignored the Club of Rome’s 1972 dire report, The Limits to Growth: A Report for The Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. That 1972 report concluded, “Left unchecked, economic and population growth would deplete the planet’s resources and cause economic collapse around 2070.” In October 2018 the journal Nature cited a new 2018 report to the Club of Rome which concluded, “More than four decades later, the (1972) report’s main conclusions are still valid.”(2)

The primary historical force on Earth for the past five centuries has been the development and exploitation of capitalism as the fuel and engine of economic growth. The prime directive now as always has been concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite. As far as capitalism is concerned, the very idea of actually imposing the sorts of checks and balances on economic growth (i.e., capitalism) the Club of Rome may have had in mind is heresy, punishable by termination with extreme prejudice. The “vile maxim” identified by Adam Smith in 1776 and its wealth <> power “vicious cycle” corollary are the sole ethical principles of capitalism. In that noxious pair of principles, the iniquitous tyranny of the 1% elite is grounded, rooted, nurtured, secured, sustained, and extended in perpetuity. They are the raison ďêtre (reason for existence) and the élan vital (life force) of the oligarchy at the head and heart of inverted totalitarianism in the 21st century. Its headquarters, command center, and hegemony are USAmerican to the core and its span of control is global.(3)

The benighted rapacity and stupidity of the ruling elite have driven humanity and Earth to the brink of existential doom, to the event horizon of our extinction as a living species. Evidence is already overwhelming and still mounting that we may have already run out of time. We are now far more likely than disappear as a form of earthly life than we are to survive. Many authoritative perspectives already confirm this reality. Here are a few: (4)

U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), Fourth National Climate Assessment, reporting to US President Donald Trump (POTUS45) in 2018: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.”

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon speaking to the 2011 World Economic Forum (WEF): “For most of the last century, economic growth was fueled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences. Those days are gone…Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.”

2019 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Global Risk Report: “climate change is the biggest threat to the planet,” naming “extreme weather, natural disasters, man-made environmental disasters, loss of biodiversity, and failure to adapt to climate change as the chief perils to society …. it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe” (emphasis added).

John Mecklin, Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Extraordinarily fast-paced advance across the full breadth of the world’s scientific and technological enterprise creates a new threat matrix where dangerous technologies may collide—with catastrophic results.”

The cover image for the November 2018 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists vividly portrays the brink-of-doom event-horizon-of-extinction we’ve reached, or perhaps already crossed over:

The Existential Threat Nexus Confronting Humanity

The Bulletin also maintains the ‘doomsday clock’ which is reset every January as an indicator of just how close we are to annihilation (‘midnight’ on the clock). As this chart shows, we entered the lowest point in the 1947-2018 history of the clock’s settings since the peak of the Cold War in 1953:

The January 2018 2-minute setting was extended into 2019 by the Bulletin on January 24, 2019. The President and CEO of the Bulletin organization, Rachel Bronson, PhD, cautioned that, “there should be no comfort taken from the fact that the clock did not move forward over the past year.” Brown explained that the threat is at least as dire if not moreso, as indicated in her remarks about the “new abnormal:”(5)

As the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board prepared for its first set of Doomsday Clock discussions this fall (in 2018), it began referring to the current world security situation as a “new abnormal.” This new abnormal is a pernicious and dangerous departure from the time when the United States sought a leadership role in designing and supporting global agreements that advanced a safer and healthier planet. The new abnormal describes a moment in which fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction, undermining our very abilities to develop and apply solutions to the big problems of our time. The new abnormal risks emboldening autocrats and lulling citizens around the world into a dangerous sense of anomie and political paralysis.

One week after the January 24 Bulletin announcement for 2019, on February 1, our POTUS45 (Trump) ended USAmerican participation in the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, one of the last nuclear arms control treaties with Russia dating back to the Cold-War Reagan era. Russia responded on February 2 by also backing out of the treaty. A new nuclear arms race was already under way and is now accelerating more swiftly with China entering the fray, having never participated in the treaty. The US Marine veteran intelligence officer who “was hand-picked to serve with the On Site Inspection Agency, responsible for carrying out the provisions of the INF Treaty,” Scott Ritter, proposes a more realistic 1-minute setting:

William Perry, former secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, helped unveil the 2019 iteration of the Doomsday Clock. In his remarks, he highlighted President Donald Trump’s declaration to withdraw from the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty as an indication of the collapsing relationship between the U.S. and Russia. “When you withdraw from treaties, you are losing this important vehicle of dialogue,” Perry observed. “My own judgment is, relative to a year ago, we are slightly worse off.”

I agree with Perry—the world is worse off today than it was a year ago. I disagree, however, with his use of the word “slightly” to describe the situation we face, and I dissent from the Bulletin’s decision to stay the hands of the Doomsday Clock. Humanity is sleepwalking toward global annihilation (emphasis added), furthered by a collective amnesia about the threat posed by nuclear weapons, especially in an environment void of meaningful arms control.(6)

William Perry’s remarks at the unveiling of the 2019 doomsday clock setting are reported in the January 24, 2019 edition of The Guardian. At that unveiling event, former governor of California Jerry Brown, new Executive Chairman of the Bulletin, commented:

We are like passengers on the Titanic, ignoring the iceberg ahead, enjoying the fine food and music …. It’s late and it’s getting later. We have to wake people up. And that’s what I intend to do!

Heir apparent to Sheldon Wolin’s prophetic political mantle, Chris Hedges is among the most astute observers of 21st century reality. New York Times foreign correspondent Pulitzer-winner, Harvard seminary MDiv graduate, ardent activist and strident speaker decrying the infamy of the ruling elite and the damnable tyranny they impose, Hedges pulls no punches in setting reality squarely before us:

Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks, rendering themselves obsolete.

The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that train religious scholars and clergy.(7)

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know that the corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. And this is a fight that in the face of the overwhelming forces against us requires that we follow those possessed by sublime madness, that we become stone catchers and find in acts of rebellion the sparks of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside the possibility of success. We must grasp the harshness of reality at the same time we refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. People of all creeds and people of no creeds must take an absurd leap of faith to believe, despite all the empirical evidence around us, that the good draws to it the good. The fight for life goes somewhere—the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.(8)

Assume the worst: it is too late to reverse this freefall into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history—this time caused by humankind and fatal to most if not all species of life, including our own. We then have very few choices and none of them will matter at the end of the day:

Denial: completely ignore and write off all the voices prophesying this imminent doom (including mine) and go on about life as if everything is fine—or it will all at least somehow turn out that way. This is one cadence in the death march we’re already on.

Futility #1: accept this doom as inevitable and just mark time until it’s over for all of us, eating, drinking, and being miserably or merrily delusional anyway. This is just another cadence in the same death march.

Futility #2: adopt Hedges’ perspective—fight the elitist fascist tyranny despite having no hope or chance of actually winning, simply because it is elitist fascist tyranny. This is the only way to break ranks from the death march and take a stand.

Futility #2 is exactly the sort of groundswell bootstrap activism Hedges calls us to embrace and become. One excellent first step is to join the Extinction Rebellion. I hope to see your name on their roster along with mine. (9)

(8) Chris Hedges, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2015), 226. See also Chris Hedges, “Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us as a Society,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/why-mass-incarceration-defines-us-as-a-society-135793245/#.UKwDspaG6uk.twitter. “Stone catcher” is an oblique reference to John 8:3-8, esp. v. 7, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Hedges describes Bryan Stevenson as an “African American lawyer who has spent his life fighting for prisoners on death row.” An elderly black woman once identified Stevenson as a “stone catcher” in this sense. On return from attending an execution at an Alabama prison, Stevenson remarked to Hedges:

There is no such thing as being a Christian and not being a stone catcher …. But that is exhausting. You’re not going to catch them all. And it hurts. If it doesn’t make you sad to have to do that, then you don’t understand what it means to be engaged in an act of faith …. But if you have the right relationship to it, it is less of a burden, finally, than a blessing. It makes you feel stronger.

We cannot build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total human enterprise unredeemed of its excesses and corruptions.

In the task of that redemption the most effective agents will be men who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned ones. The most important of these illusions is that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice. It is a very valuable illusion for the moment; for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and "spiritual wickedness in high places." The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms. It must therefore be brought under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done.

The "?" in the image above represents outcomes other than the election and incumbency of one or the other of the two candidates shown (identified at the close of this post).

A Facebook friend (called "FB#1" here) initiated a thread, commenting on the upcoming 2016 election. Another mutual friend ("FB#2) replied. Here are those two FB posts:

FB#1:I think that the climate of hate created by both Democrats and Republicans in this election cycle is deeply appalling. And I expect violence after the elections, perhaps assassination, following the voting. I hope that I am wrong.

FB#2:I share your concern. Too many people have suffered what psychologist Sara Savage calls "cognitive casualties" -- by demonizing their opponents, they have shut down their critical thinking and have become immune to further information. Summarizing some of her work I've been reading, there is a big difference between thinking your adversary is wrong about *something* (even something very big) and thinking your adversary is wrong about *everything*.

I see people building walls around themselves -- "you can't trust the media" -- "you can't trust Snopes" -- "you can't trust Google" -- meaning not merely that one should be careful about the media, but rather than one has a license to ignore any facts that come along!

I posted my own lengthy comment in response, and it prompted me to create this blog post as well. I don't disagree with either of my FB friends' views or remarks. I just feel and believe that more needs to be said to grapple with the underlying matters.

Shouldn't root-cause questions about these matters eventually be asked and answered? How did this cognitive dissonance come about, for instance? Who or what inflicts those "cognitive casualties?" Is nefarious tyranny involved (pardon my tin hat) or is it the 'natural' result of our own social and cultural decline, decay, or entropy? Even if the latter, what inherent human forces or behavioral 'laws' explain the deterioration and damages?

Frankly, I lean toward the 'tin hat' side. FB#1, FB#2, and others may disagree, of course, but I believe Sheldon Wolin (e.g., in Democracy Incorporated)), Chris Hedges (Wages of Rebellion), Noam Chomsky (Who Rules the World?) and others are right -- 99% of us are held obliviously captive to the covert tyranny of inverted totalitarianism, imposed and sustained by a 0.01% elitist oligarchy with controlling wealth and ruling power, implemented and exercised by their 0.99% 'Praetorian Guard' of regimented corporatocracy. [Numbers (99%, 0.01%, and 0.99%) are borrowed from the Occupy Movement simply to illustrate the point -- how accurate they are isn't a critical concern: the point is the same if they're 90%, 1%, 9%. The greater the elitism of the distribution, of course, the more absolute the oligarchy's power and control will be.]

I think of the "cognitive casualties" in different terms, namely, semiotic dissonancein contrast to the standard theory and model of cognitive dissonance. The semiotic conception is more cognitively comprehensive and dissonantly acute, chronic, morbid, and lethal than classic or standard views. Those are still based on 20th-century models and theories which I believe are overly dependent on (neo)postmodern, post-structuralist, and behaviorist linguisticism and scientism. Semiotics (in the Peircean, not Saussurean, tradition) offers a far more robust and profound account of human cognition and reality, I believe.

From this perspective, for instance, 'semiotic dissonance' and 'semiotic engineering' offer better explanations of the 21st-century Orwellian thought- and mind-control that sustain the tyranny of inverted totalitarianism. Looking at Election 2016 through those lenses, the circus parade, sideshows, and Big Top performances contrive by the oligarchy and staged by their corporatocracy can clearly be seen for what they truly are: -- the tyranny's means of shaping and directing mass consciousness away from the actual covert intents, purposes, and agendas set in motion long before the events we're experiencing began to appear and manufacture our delusional irreality matrix.

Could assassination(s) be on that agenda? Of course! Worse, in fact -- genocide scaled up well beyond what's already been brought about in the LDCs (Least Developed Countries) for several decades, perhaps even centuries After all, it isn't as if the decimation of the native peoples of the western hemisphere happened entirely by accident or natural attrition, just as the 'ethnic cleansing' of eastern Europe, continental Africa, and many other tyranny-targeted territories is ongoing today by systematic design, including semiotic engineering to conceal its reality and the truth thereof.

Christians comfortably ignore the full depth, scope, and impact of Paul's warnings in Ephesians 6:12, which identify the metaphysical and spiritual warfare transcending the earthly tyranny we suffer:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12, NAS)

Metaphysics, spirituality, and religions aside, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, and apostates likewise comfortably ignore the full depth, scope, and impact of human avarice and depravity currently unleashed on global scale with nihilistic apathy and already inevitably fatal consequences. Controlling wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy whose members transcend society, culture, politics, government, and the rest of us for all material and practical purposes.

While points made by FB#1 and FB#2 are valid, trust is tragically becoming an increasingly rare and precious resource and asset. I find it compellingly more rational to rely on distrust by default. I now tend to extend trust beyond my own enclosure of semiotic discernment if and only if I see no other option. I'm also beginning to reflexively trust my semiotic intuitions more readily and subject those impressions to rational scrutiny only when suspicion and skepticism require it. Classify me as a "cognitive casualty" on those grounds as you like, but it isn't as if open warfare hasn't been declared and isn't already being aggressively and violently waged against me -- indeed, against us all -- to inflict exactly those wounds and more.

Meanwhile, the rotting corpses of liberation theology and unified populist activism lie buried or entombed in the shroud of their own cold-war Marxist and other so-called 'leftist' alliances. Resurrection of those ideologies offers scant hope at best unless those alliances can be fully severed in a new harmonizing Christian and secular apologetic, witness, and testimony capable of inspiring many or most of the 90-99% of us to rise up and stand firm in peaceful, nonviolent unity to resist and oppose the covert tyranny of Inverted totalitarianism.

But the likelihood of that taking place, unfortunately, is quite low. Here are the approximate probabilities of outcomes, as I see them. The numbers are basically arbitrary, but the ordering is the intended message:

The overlord aliens finally reveal themselves and openly assume total control -- 0.1%

Jesus returns -- 0.1%

#1-#4 are the most likely outcomes. #5-#8 are the less likely and 'all bets are off' outcomes (with the possible exception of #6). #3 and #5 may actually be among the likely outcomes, in fact, considering recent escalating and intensifying of tensions between Russia and the US over Syria, for instance. The tyranny's bread and circuses that keep us blindly consuming and deluded very effectively conceal such things from us, and obfuscate their probabilities of occurrence.

As a Christian, all likelihood and probability irrelevant, #8 is my constant hope and prayer -- Lord, please hasten that day!

Your best and most trusted friend and coworker just texted you to say ISIS is taking credit for a suicide truck bomb attack that killed 200 people Saturday night in a busy shopping district of Baghdad, Iraq, and the body count continues to rise. If you're like most Americans and the story arouses your interest, you'll probably do two things:

You're now virtually certain the report is true and the information is factually correct. But you check a third source just to be sure; one that very few Americans would even consider - the online English edition of Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned pan-Arab television news channel. The story is also confirmed by this source, including the ongoing rise in casualty count.

If you're like most Americans, you'll now go social: you'll activate one or more online accounts to follow the feeding frenzy surrounding the event, and you'll probably eagerly join in. After all, you're now among the best-informed at the banquet, since you went the extraordinary mile to verify the story's veracity on a Muslim newsfeed!

If you're like most Americans, you'll appreciate the tragedy and loss suffered by the families of those ISIS victims in Baghdad. But you must integrate that tragedy and loss into your own bigger picture worldview. Currently at the center of that mental landscape are two events:

the June 12, 2016 Orlando Massacre at the Pulse nightclub, with 49 fatalities and 53 wounded was also ISIS-related (the most recent event of its type), and

9/11, the 'big bang' event toward and around which all others in your worldview tend to gravitate and orbit.

Like every American since 9/11, your bigger mental picture worldview believes a war is ongoing between the Western and Muslim worlds, and events like the Baghdad truck bombing and the Orlando Massacre are just the latest current events proving its escalation and intensity. Like every American since 9/11, it is also true that your bigger mental picture worldview of beliefs about the Western and Muslim worlds sits atop a smoldering emotional volcano of rage, fear, and despair as a caldera of paper-thin convictions.

Here's the vital point to understand: everything written above could be revised to shift from an American or Western perspective to a Muslim point of view. To see this, and to enrich the experience of reading the rest of the post, readers are encouraged to re-read the paragraphs above and mentally make that shift in their own minds as they read.

We cling desperately to those convictions about the American-Muslim war because they are all we have left after the tangible ash, rubble, and debris of 9/11 disappeared. But the strength of those convictions is paper-thin and illusory because the beliefs they uphold ultimately are almost entirely fabricated upon information provided by global media foundations. How many average degrees of personal direct connection separate 'most Americans' and 'most Muslims?' For most Americans and Muslims there are no personal direct connections. We shatter our own credulity to suppose we actually knowthe truth about each other. Trusting global corporate media to provide that truth is as futile and delusional as adding salt to an ocean to dry it up: it only drowns the truth in disinformation we completely fail to grasp and floods the mind out of itself into emotional darkness.

Long before but especially since the financial crisis of 2007-08, I find that discovering the truth about the world and my place in it can best be achieved if I do my best to follow the moneyas a highly reliable way to gather evidence. To ensure the rationality of the truths I adopt with conviction, I rely on abductive reasoning- the logical principle and process of inferring from all the relevant evidence the simplest theory that best explains it. To facilitate this process, having these two keenly sharpened mental razors ready for use ensures the simplicity, elegance, and quality of the theory as an explanation of the relevant evidence:

Occam's razor - among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected; and,

Hanlon's razor - never attribute to malice anything that can adequately be explained by incompetence.

With this in mind, I'll posit just two assumptions, as follows:

A super-elite plutocracy consisting of roughly 0.01% of the world's population (about 70,000 individuals) oversees a global corporatocracy consisting of roughly 0.99% of the world's population (about 70 million individuals), which serves the single mission and purpose of sustaining and increasing the wealth and power of the plutocracy at any cost.

The corporatocracy carries out all executive, administrative, and operational activities required to fulfill its mission and purpose by forming a global oligarchy as a nexus of private, commercial, corporate, government, social, and other enterprise complexes through which maximum engineering and control of human activity and behavior are the primary goals.

In essence these assumptions postulate the existence of a inverted totalitarian global tyranny whereby 1% of the population constantly strives to exert maximum control over the other 99% solely to increase their own wealth and power by any means necessary (including individual, eugenic, and genocidal 'termination with extreme prejudice'). For simplicity, let's just call the global inverted totalitarian tyranny of the elitist plutocracy and corporatocracy, 'Tyrannozilla Max,' or 'TM' for short.

From the two assumptions above, if we were to follow the money and wield Occam's and Hanlon's razors, how likely are we to find the following conjectures to be true?

Tyrannozilla Max (TM) profitability - all the fear, anger, hatred, and enmity intrinsic to contemporary Western-Muslim conflict and the ongoing military and other violence emanating from those states and conditions yield trillions of dollars in wealth for the global elite plutocracy. Year-over-year this wealth flow is steadily increasing while being concentrated under the control of a declining number of ultra-high net worth individuals. [Evidence sample: global wealth reports by Cap Gemini, Boston Consulting Group, and Wealth-X & UBS (collaboration).]

Tyrannozilla Max (TM) control - the news, entertainment, marketing, and commerce complex within the corporatocracy is vital for widespread systematic engineering and control of thought and behavior, especially through the media generation of mass cognitive dissonance producing chronic despair and acute anxiety are generated and sustained.

Tyrannozilla Max (TM) nonexistence - one essential objective of mass cognitive dissonance is to conceal the existence and power of the plutocracy and their corporatocracy and oligarchy and the tyranny they implement and enforce, such that in the event that any suspicion or evidence surfaces to the contrary, the sources of that information are swiftly dealt with via relentless media attack to vilify, marginalize, and by any means necessary destroy the source's credibility and the evidence itself.

Evidence samples for all three of these TM conjectures include but are not limited to these documentary films:

The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.

For 2016 and henceforth, Hoover's remarks precisely describe why TM's existence could well be a truth so monstrously incomprehensible and beyond that it is easily concealed in plain sight. It also indicates how effectively cognitive dissonance may be used by TM further its agenda - the profound dissonance of truth so monstrous as TM becomes a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of the world's only superpower (the USA). Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four prophecies of "thoughtcrime," "doublethink," and "Newspeak" are yield a pandemic communication implosion into sheer meaninglessness, comparable only to Babel in mythic proportion. The US presidential election for 2016 is blatant evidence of the darkness of this semantic vacuum and the intensity of its cognitive polarization.

Finally, the crucial questions: if the TM assumptions and the evidence supporting them are true and factual, such that TM abductively qualifies as the simplest and best explanation of all the evidence, doesn't that mean the Western-Muslim conflict is a manufactured mass cognitive delusion? Does it not therefore follow that 99% of each of those two people groups should unite to defeat their common and true enemy, namely, the inverted totalitarian tyranny of global plutocracy and corporatocracy?

Or perhaps Chris Hedges is right; it's too late, victory is impossible and defeat is already a fait accompli. Speaking of Goldman Sachs in particular but no less truly of Tyrannozilla Max (TM) as described above:

These people are criminals .... Every single institution, from the press to universities, to the courts, to the legislative bodies, to the executive branch of government, dance to the tune that they play. And there's absolutely no way that ordinary citizens can fight back. There is no mechanism within the formal structures of power by which we can fight back. We live not in a democracy but what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls a system of inverted totalitarianism, and by that he means it's not classical totalitarianism: it doesn't revolve around a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. We're being destroyed .... They know no limits, they turn everything into a commodity that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse .... The death of the American empire is not a tragedy; it's probably a good thing. It's just how we're dying that is so frightening, because we're lashing out like a wounded animal, and, um, you know, empires, the tyranny empires impose abroad they always bring home, they always impose at home. Thucidides and Plutarch wrote about that in ancient Athens - Athenian democracy was slaughtered by the Athenians and we're doing exactly the same thing. Civilizations from the Easter Islands to the Ottoman Empire, the collapse of Imperial Russia ... they always exhaust their own potential and their own resources. The danger though is this time it's global. We'll bring the whole planet down with us. There's nowhere left to migrate to.[Goldman Sachs: Masters of the World?, from mark 42:30 to end.]

I can only echo Walt Kelly's Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us ..." and add, "yes, 1% of the time. The other 99%? We're prisoners, slaves, victims, and collateral damage."

As a logician and semiotician, the power of fallacious rhetoric to completely defeat truth and rationality never ceases to amaze me. The 2016 election is panning out to be a grand circus of sophistry galore, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Know first that I am an evangelical Christian. That spiritual commitment is integrated with logic, semiotics, and a well-reasoned philosophy of science to form my worldview. All the rest of who I am and how I live derive from those grounds and foundations.

anyone still failing to see the most likely scenario - i.e., a ballot with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the 'candidates of choice' - as a forced choice between the lesser of two evils suffers severe cognitive dissonance; and,

the same is true of anyone believing what 99% of the media - mainstream and fringe stream alike - are feeding us about the candidates, and the truth will almost certainly never surface and be settled with rational clarity and assurance.

At its very best, a Trump vs. Clinton decision requires taking either of two equally severe risks. But that isn't the real problem. The fallacy underlying the choice is the real problem - it's a complex question fallacy.

The Clinton vs. Trump question lures the unwitting voter into believing one or the other, not both, and no other must be chosen. The vivid example I like to use is this:

In one hand you're given a .45 caliber M1911, and in the other a 9mm Beretta FS92. Each gun is loaded with hollow-point rounds, chambered, safety off, ready to fire. You are told, peer-pressured, and actually believe you must shoot yourself in the foot with one or the other.

The truth is that you really don't have to pull the trigger at all. Don't vote. 99% of the peer pressure that says not voting is unpatriotic, un-American, un-Scriptural, un-Christian, and all the rest is simply wrong: abstention can be (and in 2016 will be) a fully viable and rational alternative (more on that shortly).

You can also shoot between the horns of the dilemma at the system (?) or individual (?) convincing you that you have only those choices. You have the right to vote by writing-in any name(s) you choose. Anyone telling you otherwise is violating that right. It only sends a message and it won't be heard, but as a matter of principle, it's a more rational and moral action. Here are two ways to consider doing this:

Voice Your Rights - Write Your Voice, namely, write-in the name(s) of someone you personally know, respect, and trust, with your life (the American way of life is at stake, after all); or,

The ANONYMOUS 'THumP' option, namely, "To rise for change, simply register to vote and at the polling booth on the day of elections, write in the word ANONYMOUS."

Other ways to find yourself impaled on the horns of a complex question fallacy: when anyone asks, "Are you a Democrat or Republican (liberal or conservative, socialist or communist, fascist or capitalist, Muslim or Christian, and so on, ad nauseum)? The lethal danger of this fallacy is its inherent divisiveness - it forces our own thinking against itself, and it conquers and rules us by dividing us against ourselves.

Allow yourself to thus be semiotically branded and labelled and rational discourse becomes impossible. Refusal to be branded and labelled produces the same outcome - and just as swiftly - proving that rational political discourse has become virtually impossible. The meanings of these signs have exactly one content, intent, and purpose - emotional bias buttressing prejudiced opposition without benefit of objective reason and critical thinking. The most univocal position one will experience is violent condemnation of the rational decision to abstain from voting when only evil (or horribly risky) options are presented.

Yet this is exactly the moral and spiritual principle taught and preached by the Apostle Paul in Romans 3. Accused of teaching that evil should be done that grace may increase, Paul refuted the charge by exposing its implicit absurdity: it ultimately leads to the conclusion that since all are guilty of sin, none are guilty of sin.

I want to borrow that phrase “let us do evil, that good may come” in application to the prevailing notion that one must vote for the “lesser of two evils.”

Christians probably use this flawed argument more than any other segment of the American electorate, because Christians must continually give up ideological ground when it comes to the support of Republican political candidates.

The argument goes something like this:

“Candidate R is not all that great. In fact, he is really weak on issues a, b, c, and d. However if we don’t vote for Candidate R, then Candidate D will win the election and we all know that Candidate D is really scary.”

When the possibility is raised of a 3rd party candidate, the argument switches to something like this:

“I really like what Candidate 3 stands for, but he has no chance of winning. If I vote for Candidate 3 I am wasting my vote. In fact, if I vote for Candidate 3 it will be the same as voting for Candidate D since it will siphon votes away from Candidate R. I know Candidate R is really not what the country needs, but Candidate D is really, really scary!”

This is a “let us do evil, that good may come” proposition.

That is, let us vote for an acknowledged, although supposedly lesser evil (“let us do evil”), so that the supposed greater evil won’t win (“that good may come”). This path has led America consistently to the left for at least the last 50 years! The “lesser” evil has become progressively more evil, so that we have arrived at what Pastor Chuck Baldwin refers to as “the evil of two lessers!”

Chuck Baldwin exposes this fallacious rationalization even more vividly in characterizing a "wasted vote" as "a vote for someone you know does not represent your own beliefs and principles ... for someone you know will not lead the country in the way it should go. A wasted vote is a vote for the 'lesser of two evils.'" He was commenting on the race between McCain and Obama in 2008, but that just shows how things haven't changed - or have only worsened - over the past eight years.

The worst of it, perhaps, is the extent to which the blinding semiotic fog of media manipulation and deception make it both virtually and practically impossible to form a rational grasp of the truth about the issues or the candidates, or how they stand on issues even apart from their values, character, etc. Truth falls hopelessly behind, irretrievably lost in the disinformation tsunami.

It is the circus of cacophonic sophistry and the theater of absurd irreality. We aren't even spectators enjoying the show ... we're the sawdust underfoot of the clown masquerade and the emperor's and empress's hubristic naked strut.

The Republican wild card is 'raging Bull Elephant' Trumpeter. Most if not all of the trailing pachyderms in the herd are just clone puppets of the corporatocracy establishment. Rand Paul is a bit of a wild card from a more rational deck, but, sad to say, he's now just one of the dark-horse longshots. For the moment Cruz appears to be the Bull Trumpeter's only challenge for nomination.

The Democrat wild card is Sanders. The other soulless ass at the podium is Clinton, clearly the party's insider for the ruling machine; perhaps even a puppetmaster trained and mentored by Henry Kissinger, ranked by some as one of the world's most rabid and effective psychopaths (see NSSM 200 for a sample of his pathological eugenics; the full memo is worth reading, but the table of contents alone is chilling enough). TBD: whether the DNC fix is already in place to Burn the Bern and ensure the MADam Minion nomination ... IA and NH suggest it's at least a deal in the making, however.

Kudos to the Donkey-Dums for keeping it comparatively simple and merely foggy (vs. totally darkpool). BOO-HISS and thumbs down to Elephant-Elitists for turning it all into yet another free-for-all circus of absurdity (and remaining totally darkpool).

Much as I shudder to even imagine so, fringe perspectives from the likes of Alex Jones and Lew Rockwell actually seem to offer a more rational analysis of 21st century reality than anyone else with a mainstream presence. They are voices worth listening to in any case, and Anonymous is also worth tracking. Jim Fetzer's podcasts, videos, and blog posts are also compelling, and his thinking is likely to be the most scientifically and philosophically astute.

The race is just entering the back stretch so it's still early on. But thus far I see absolutely no signs that 2016 will be anything more than ongoing acceleration of tyranny and erosion of liberty and justice. Plenty of financial signs are surfacing that may imply 2008-09 was prologue to much worse in 2016 ... right on track with historical economic trends.

Trust Jesus and suit up in the Armor of God every day! The War of all wars rages on and -- thank God! -- we know where it's headed and we know the outcome ... but there's plenty of hell to pay in the meantime.